Ashley Southall

Officers often then searched the detainees — the vast majority of whom were young black and Latino men — for weapons that rarely materialized.

The encounters were part of a controversial program known as “stop-and-frisk,” which defined policing under Bloomberg.

As Bloomberg, the 108th mayor of New York, lays the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign, his legacy with stop-and-frisk has emerged as a vulnerability for him on the campaign trail.

On Sunday, he apologized for his role in promoting a policy during his time in office that eroded trust of the police in black and Latino neighborhoods.

“Our focus was on saving lives,” he said during a speech at a black church in Brooklyn. “But the fact is: Far too many innocent people were being stopped.”

Here’s why the program was and remains a divisive issue in New York.

What is ‘Stop-and-Frisk’?

Stop-and-frisk is a crime-prevention strategy that had been a staple of policing in the United States for more than 30 years before Bloomberg took office. It allows police officers to detain someone for questioning on the street, in public housing projects or in private buildings where landlords request police patrols.

Officers are required to have reasonable belief that the person is, has been or is about to be involved in a crime. If police officers believe the detainee is armed, an officer can conduct a frisk by passing his hands over the person’s outer garments.

The strategy spread with the adoption of the data-driven Compstat management system in the 1990s, which allowed police to track and respond to crime trends in real time.

After taking office in 2002, Bloomberg oversaw a dramatic expansion in the use of stop-and-frisk. The number of stops multiplied sevenfold, peaking with 685,724 in 2011 and then tumbling to 191,851 in 2013. During Bloomberg’s three terms, the police recorded 5,081,689 stops.

“The temperature in the city at the time was that the police were at war with black and brown people on the streets,” said Jenn Rolnick-Borchetta, the director of impact litigation at the Bronx Defenders, one of the groups that has successfully sued the Police Department over the practice. “And that is how people experienced it.”

Why did Bloomberg support it?

At the same time that officers were conducting more searches as part of stop-and-frisk, crime continued to decline, a correlation that Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, viewed as cause and effect. The two men said stop-and-frisk was helping to take guns off the street and reduce violence across the city.

Statistics appeared to back them up: In 2002, Bloomberg’s first year in office, the number of murders in the city fell below 600, and dropped to 335 by the time he left office in 2013. Even as the amount of crime rose or fluctuated in other cities, New York’s crime rate declined, continuing a streak that had begun in 1991.

Bloomberg and Kelly fiercely defended stop-and-frisk in the face of criticism and legal challenges. They argued that it was an essential practice for police, and predicted — wrongly, it would turn out — that curtailing it would lead to a dramatic rise in crime.

“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” Bloomberg said in 2013. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”

Opponents said it was racist and counterproductive

But more factors affect crime trends than just police tactics, and critics of the program said that under Bloomberg it gave officers overly broad discretion to target mostly black and Latino boys and men for stops.

In 2009, black and Latino people in New York were nine times as likely to be stopped by the police compared with white residents.

The strategy was used with such intensity that officers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville conducted 52,000 stops over eight square blocks between January 2006 and March 2010 — the equivalent of one stop for each resident there every year. The arrest rate was less than 1% for the 14,000 residents.

The policy resulted in a series of lawsuits by black and Latino men. One man, Nicholas Peart, described being held at gunpoint on his 18th birthday as an officer passed his hand over the young man’s groin and buttocks before leaving without an explanation — one of five times he had been stopped by the police.

“Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head,” he wrote in The Times. “For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.”

Only 14 out of every 10,000 stops conducted during the Bloomberg era turned up a gun, and just 1,200 ended with a fine, an arrest or the seizure of an illegal weapon, according to police data analyzed by the New York Civil Liberties Union. A Columbia University professor said the stops were no better at producing gun seizures than chance.

Black and Latino people were more likely be to stopped and frisked, even though their white counterparts were twice as likely to be found with a gun, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“This is where the racial bias is particularly clear,” Christopher Dunn, the legal director of the group, said.

And a judge said it was illegal

The controversy culminated with a federal judge in Manhattan ruling in 2013 that the searches amounted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” of black and Latino people. The ruling covered three concurrent cases.

According to data and testimony presented at trial, the police targeted black and Latino males as young as 13 for being in neighborhoods with high crime rates or for making “furtive” movements — a loosely defined term that encapsulated virtually any type of behavior, such as sitting on benches, looking over a shoulder or going into a building with a broken front door. Dissenting officers described being pressured to make stops to meet numerical quotas.

The city argued in court that a stop that did not result in a summons, arrest or weapons seizure still prevented crime by discouraging people from carrying guns.

“That was the theory that Bloomberg supported, that if you let them know that they might be stopped anytime, anywhere, that they will stop bringing out their guns,” the judge who made the ruling, Shira Scheindlin, now a private mediator and lawyer, said Sunday.

Bloomberg defended the practice as recently as January, denying any racial bias in the policy by pointing to the drop in murders during his time in office.

He struck a different tone on Sunday.

“I got something important really wrong,” he said at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn. “I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities.”

Crime continued to fall after the policy was abandoned

Stop-and-frisk became a key issue in the 2013 mayoral race. Mayor Bill de Blasio won a long-shot campaign that year in part because he promised to undo the heavy-handed policing tactics of the Bloomberg administration.

During the campaign, Bloomberg criticized the attacks on stop-and-frisk as political showmanship that risked people’s lives. But his predictions about what would happen if the strategy was eliminated were wrong.

During de Blasio’s first term as mayor, stops decreased by 76%, to 11,627 in 2017, from 45,787 in his first year. At the same time, crime fell to levels not seen since the 1950s. Over the last two years, the city has logged fewer than 300 murders annually.

Where stop-and-frisk stands now

Bloomberg appealed Scheindlin’s ruling, but de Blasio agreed to implement court-ordered reforms. The changes included mandating most officers to wear body cameras and the entire force to be trained in de-escalating conflict and recognizing their own bias.

But racial disparities persist in the street-stop program, and a federal monitor overseeing reforms has repeatedly raised concerns that officers and supervisors do not document and review stops in accordance with Police Department policy. The monitor, Peter L. Zimroth, said the failures impeded efforts to make sure reforms were taking hold.

“Addressing the persistent problem of underreporting of stops and the failure of supervisors to deal with that underreporting and the quality of the stop reports that are filed must be part of that effort,” Zimroth said.

This article originally appeared in

Why 'Stop-and-Frisk' Inflamed Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods

During Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor of New York City, police officers stopped and questioned people they believed to be engaged in criminal activity on the street more than 5 million times.

Investigators were looking at those possibilities Sunday to explain what led to a shooting that left Goode and three others dead after a gunfight inside the Triple A Aces Private &amp; Social Rental Place in Crown Heights, said a police official, who requested anonymity to discuss an investigation in its early stages.

Witnesses told the police that Goode, 37, pulled a gun inside the club just before 7 a.m. Saturday and told everyone to get down, the official said. He fired a warning shot into the ceiling, and then turned the gun on fellow gamblers packed into the small space.

Before he was shot by a bouncer standing guard, Goode had killed two of his own acquaintances, the official said.

The bouncer, Dominick Wimbush, 47, was shot and killed in the crossfire, as were Terrence Bishop, 36, and John Thomas, 32. All the men lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant except for Goode, whose last known address was in Canarsie. It was the second quadruple homicide in New York City in a week.

Bishop’s brother, Eddie Baldwin, told reporters gathered at Triple A Aces on Sunday that investigators think Goode believed he was losing the card game because his competitors were cheating.

“The detectives told us a guy at the club was cheated and wanted his money back,” Baldwin, 35, said.

The police said investigators were still trying to pin down a precise motive for the shooting and to figure out how the social club operated. There were no arrests Sunday, the police said, and it was still unclear whether anyone would be charged with a crime.

On Sunday afternoon, police tape still hung from the edges of the compact wood frame town house at 74 Utica Ave., less than two blocks from the local precinct, where the shooting occurred. Two uniformed police officers kept watch on the sidewalk as lights flashed from their patrol car parked at the curb.

Inside, investigators recovered shell casings indicating that Goode had fired 15 rounds from a 9 mm handgun, the police official said. Wimbush returned four rounds from a revolver before he was killed. The police said Saturday that crime-scene investigators recovered both guns.

Neighbors had complained the club was a nuisance. The police had been there just once in response to a call for aid, but no crime was reported at the time, the official said.

The police chief of patrol, Rodney Harrison, said he was bothered by the fact that the club seemed to be a known problem in the neighborhood, but had not been reported to the police.

“I need the community to work with us and stop these operations, because if you don’t, unfortunate things may happen,” Harrison said.

On Sunday, the building’s owner, Samuel Revells, stood outside and waited for the police to give him permission to go inside and inspect the damage.

Revells said he had owned the building for more than 20 years and rented it to the operator of the social club for the past two years. But he said he did not know anything about the establishment or any of the people who congregated there.

“Let him be the one that speaks on this,” he said of the club operator, whose name he refused to share.

Baldwin, Bishop’s brother, said the killing compounded the grief the family was dealing with after the recent death of their father from cancer. The brothers had planned to meet Sunday, Baldwin’s birthday.

Instead, he said, he was questioning why his brother had died. “Money has been here before you and been here after you,” he said. “I mean what’s the whole purpose?”

On Sunday afternoon, three votive candles and a bow-tied bouquet in plastic wrap sat in the doorway of the apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvesant where the police said Wimbush lived.

“May you find faith and peace in your time of need,” read a handwritten note on the bouquet’s card. Family members entering and leaving the building declined to comment. A neighbor, Eddie Williams, 36, said he knew the slain guard as “Nick,” and said he last saw him, as usual, on Friday getting coffee.

“I see him every morning,” Williams said. “We always have our talk and drink a little coffee, and I never in my life heard nothing bad about Nick.”

Brooklyn Shooting: Poker Player Opened Fire and Was Killed by Bouncer

NEW YORK — Chester Goode might have been holding a grudge after a fight last year at an unlicensed social club tucked in a row of town houses in Brooklyn. Or perhaps he was losing a game of poker and wanted to rob other gamblers at the illicit operation that drew patrons in flashy cars — and complaints from neighbors.

Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill dismissed the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, just over two weeks after a police administrative judge found him guilty of violating a department ban on chokeholds.

“The unintended consequence of Mr. Garner’s death must have a consequence of its own,” O’Neill said. “Therefore I agree with the deputy commissioner of trial’s legal findings and recommendations. It is clear that Daniel Pantaleo can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer.”

Garner died July 17, 2014, after Pantaleo tackled him from behind, then, along with other officers, pressed him down on the pavement. Captured on video, the arrest and Garner’s last words — “I can’t breathe” — galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement.

The case had defined the Police Department’s relationship with the public under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned for office on a promise to reverse the aggressive policing of low-level crimes — known as the “broken windows” strategy — that his predecessor had championed. The mayor had come under intense criticism for not pushing to have Pantaleo fired sooner.

At a news conference in City Hall, de Blasio said the firing of Pantaleo “ended a chapter that has brought our people so much pain and so much fear these last five years.”

“Today we have finally seen justice done,” said de Blasio, who is running for president on his credentials as a progressive Democrat. “We must devote ourselves to this simple goal: No one should have to go through the agony that the city has gone through here. Let this be the last tragedy.”

The leader of the city’s largest police union immediately denounced the decision, saying O’Neill had bowed to “anti-police extremists” and that Pantaleo’s dismissal sent a message that the city did not stand behind its officers when they make arrests.

“We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” the Police Benevolent Association president, Patrick J. Lynch, said in a statement. “We will uphold our oath, but we cannot and will not do so by needlessly jeopardizing our careers or personal safety.”

Garner’s family said it would continue to press for congressional hearings into his death and for state legislation making it a crime for a police officer to use a chokehold. They also continued to call for other officers involved in Garner’s arrest to be punished for their actions.

“For Commissioner O’Neill, I thank you for doing the right thing,” said Emerald Snipes Garner, Eric Garner’s daughter, at a news conference. “You finally made a decision that should have been made five years ago.”

For years, the Garner family, some elected officials and critics of the Police Department have said Garner’s death was an outcome of the department’s “broken windows” strategy, which affected black and Latino neighborhoods disproportionately.

As protests grew, Pantaleo became a symbol of long-standing problems with how the police treat people, mostly black and Latino, suspected of low-level crimes. Garner died as he was being arrested on charges of selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island.

After Garner’s death, the Police Department scaled back the heavy enforcement of low-level crimes. But Pantaleo’s continued employment on the police force still infuriated Garner’s family and their supporters. They lobbied for the officer to be fired and stripped of his pension, and put pressure on de Blasio to make it happen.

Under the City Charter and state law, however, the decision to fire Pantaleo ultimately belonged to O’Neill, not the mayor.

Speaking to reporters at Police Headquarters, O’Neill said he had tried to be fair and impartial and to make the decision without regard to political considerations. He noted that Pantaleo had been sent to arrest Garner as part of an effort to stop drug dealing and other crime around Tompkinsville Park on Staten Island.

O’Neill said had he been in Pantaleo’s place, he might have made the same mistakes and that Garner set the tragedy in motion by resisting arrest. Still, the commissioner said, Pantaleo did not relax his grip on Garner’s neck after the men fell to the ground, and his recklessness triggered a fatal asthma attack.

The commissioner also acknowledged many rank-and-file officers would be angered by his decision, noting he had been a police officer for decades before becoming commissioner.

“If I were still a cop, I would probably be mad at me,” he said.

A Staten Island grand jury and federal civil rights prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against Pantaleo, igniting protests.

Besides Pantaleo, Garner’s family has pointed out that there are at least 11 other officers who should be held accountable for their actions leading up to Garner’s death and the aftermath. Only one — Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, who was the first supervisor to arrive on the scene — faces discipline.

Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, was expected to challenge the decision in court. London and the Police Benevolent Association have long accused de Blasio of sacrificing Pantaleo to satisfy public anger that threatens the mayor’s political ambitions.

Pantaleo had been suspended without pay since Aug. 2, when a department judge, Deputy Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado, found him guilty of reckless assault following an administrative trial at Police Headquarters.

Perhaps more than anything, Pantaleo’s departure signaled the city’s pivot from depending on aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses to fight overall crime to relying on officers’ problem-solving skills and their ability to build mutual trust with residents.

O’Neill designed the current crime-fighting strategy, called neighborhood policing, in his previous role as chief of department and has said he wants it to be his legacy.

In 2014, police supervisors on Staten Island targeted Garner for arrest in response to orders from headquarters to address neighborhood complaints about people illegally selling untaxed, loose cigarettes.

The directive was part of the broken-windows policy championed by O’Neill’s predecessor, William J. Bratton, which relied on cracking down on activities that police believed diminished the quality-of-life in order to prevent serious crime.

Maldonado affirmed in her 46-page decision what many people, including federal prosecutors, believe the video plainly showed: Pantaleo’s initial grip on Garner slipped as the two men grappled and became a chokehold, which the department banned two decades ago.

Maldonado said in her report that the video of the July 17, 2014, encounter and an autopsy that found fresh hemorrhaging in Garner’s neck muscles provided “overwhelming” evidence that Pantaleo had used a chokehold in spite of being trained not to.

The judge’s ruling was a major victory for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city agency that investigates abuse and misconduct allegations against the police and prosecutes some disciplinary cases under an agreement with the department.

Pantaleo’s “use of a chokehold,” she wrote, “fell so far short of objective reasonableness that this tribunal found it to be reckless — a gross deviation from the standard of conduct established for a New York City police officer.”

The judge also found Pantaleo was untruthful when he later denied to Internal Affairs investigators that he had used a chokehold, saying his explanation was “implausible and self-serving.”

But, like the local grand jury and federal prosecutors before her, she did not find evidence that the chokehold was intentional.

The city’s largest police union criticized the decision as “pure political insanity.” Lynch said that if O’Neill adopted the judge’s recommendation, he would “lose his Police Department.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/nyregion/eric-garner-daniel-pantaleo-fired.html" id="51b75ba5-683e-3a56-ac87-4b88ac44573c">The New York Times</a>.

NYPD Fires Officer in 2014 Chokehold Case

NEW YORK — The New York City police officer whose chokehold was partly blamed for Eric Garner’s death in police custody in 2014 was fired from the Police Department on Monday, ending a bitter, five-year legal battle that had cast a shadow over the nation’s largest police force and the city it protects.

Dominique Jefferson said he spotted a man reaching into his pants and thought the stranger was going for a gun.

Nearby stood Jason Pagan, a 38-year-old reputed member of the Bloods street gang who had gotten out of prison six months earlier after serving time for a gun charge.

Seconds later, Pagan was fatally shot.

The shooting also wounded 11 other people, jolting a city where violence has declined but where gang feuds have fueled a rise in shootings that have killed and wounded more than a dozen bystanders this year, including a 7-year-old, police say. Investigators were looking for at least two people linked to Saturday’s shooting but had made no arrests as of Tuesday evening.

The gunfire started a few minutes before 11 p.m. after partygoers had sung “Family Reunion” by the O’Jays and had begun filing home from the Brownsville Playground, at Hegeman and Christopher avenues. Some in the crowd used canes, walkers and wheelchairs. But younger groups of people were just arriving and congregating on the playground, witnesses said.

Friends had been inviting Pagan to the block party in Brooklyn for years, they said, and on Saturday night, he finally had agreed to stop by on his way to another gathering.

“I gave him a great big hug,” said Raven Fason, who described herself as a close friend of Pagan.

Witnesses told the police that Pagan, 38, got into an argument with two men — one in a button-down shirt and the other in a white shirt and dark shorts, who was seen holding a gun.

Davis, 55, a retired coach for the Police Athletic League, said he heard a woman’s voice warning, “They getting ready to start.” Before anyone could run, he said, the shooting started.

“All you heard was pow-pow-pow-pow-pow,” he said. “I turned back around to head to where my friend was. I took about two steps and I got hit in the back.”

The flash of gunfire lit up Pagan’s face, Fason said, and then the shooter, who was hard to see in the darkness, turned the gun on people who were fleeing. “He started shooting into the crowd,” she said. “All I see was the flashes going off.”

Someone fired back, possibly Pagan, the police said. Shell casings from the scene indicated at least two weapons engaged in crossfire. One firearm was recovered.

Tony Bonet, 44, said he heard two initial shots — “pop, pop!” — followed after a pause by a barrage of shots. “We saw people dropping in front of us. It was like something out of TV,” he said.

Pandemonium broke out. “They were running every different kind of way,” said Michael Thomas, a retired police officer who was near a performance stage on Hegeman Avenue. “I was afraid for the people that couldn’t run, people who had canes, wheelchairs, babies.”

Investigators said several of the victims — who ranged in age from 21 to 55 — had gang ties, including Pagan, who they believe was a member of the Bloods. He was released on parole in January after he was caught with a .40-caliber handgun in 2016, and law enforcement officials said he was a suspect in a previous shooting.

“There’s a lot of information coming in, but it’s still very preliminary,” Dermot Shea, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said Monday.

A list of the victims’ injuries provided by the police suggested a worse tragedy was narrowly averted. Two of the surviving victims were shot in the head and six were struck in the torso, according to the list.

One of the bullets hit Daniesa Murdaugh in the back as she fled. Doctors told her they believed that somehow the slug had lost enough velocity — perhaps after ricocheting off her bra strap — to prevent it from entering her body, she said. “It terrifies me,” said Murdaugh, 21.

The bullet that hit Davis missed his spine by inches. He said police officers who put pressure on his wound saved his life.

The gunfire shattered a normally peaceful homecoming for current and former residents of Brownsville. It came a little more than a day before a young white supremacist opened fire at a garlic festival in California, killing three people. Many New Yorkers drew a comparison between the two attacks, although Mayor Bill de Blasio resisted calling the one in Brooklyn a mass shooting, saying “that phrase is usually reserved for a different type of situation.”

The mayor’s comment drew scorn from community leaders and elected Democrats in Brooklyn, some of whom said the mayor was playing down its gravity because of his presidential aspirations. “I think that’s a political liability for him,” said Assemblyman Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said that calling the incident a mass shooting would draw more aid to Brownsville. “When it’s called a mass shooting, there’s an outpouring of support and resources that goes to that community,” he said.

Freddi Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said de Blasio was waiting for the Police Department to determine the motive for the shooting and its intended targets. “That will indicate whether it is identified as a mass shooting,” she said.

Violent crime has declined more than 75% in the neighborhood since 1993, when there were 74 homicides. Still, Brownsville is one of nine areas where crime rates remain twice the citywide average, according to the police. Gang feuds are linked to half the homicides and shootings in the neighborhood, police have said.

Less than a mile from where Pagan was killed, a familiar grief was sinking in at an apartment building on Sutter Avenue, where Pagan had lived on the ninth floor with his grandmother. His family had been through this before: His younger brother, George Moore, who was known as Joey, was killed in 2007.

Just outside the building were dozens of votive candles, and a few large color photographs of Pagan striking poses in stylish jeans, sneakers, ball caps and, in one, a sweater.

The version of Pagan that law enforcement officials described was not the side he showed to his neighbors, who remembered him as an amiable father of two children.

“He was a real good dude, didn’t bother nobody,” Mo Johnson, 32, said as he scrawled a message in red marker on a poster hung outside the building to memorialize Pagan.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker kid,” said Raul Salaman, 53, “but he hung out with thugs.”

Pagan was arrested in 2016 and pleaded guilty to a weapons charge that led to a two-year prison term, officials said.

Pagan seemed the kind of person that Davis, a native of Brownsville, had spent his life trying to help.

Before he retired in 2007, Davis, who goes by the nickname “Lottie,” coached basketball for the Police Athletic League on Rockaway Avenue and held tournaments at the Brownsville Recreation Center, located near the park where the shooting unfolded after Saturday’s festivities. He had lived across the street for more than 20 years and coached flag football in his spare time.

After retiring, Davis worked for about two years at the Democratic Club, where he ran youth programs. His main goal, he said, was to enroll young people in a summer jobs program, and he often dialed up friends at City Hall to squeeze in teenagers whose applications were rejected.

“I showed them that there were other ways to survive,” Davis said. “And the way to survive is to use your community.”

The police commissioner, James O’Neill, said he had heard the same diagnosis from other community leaders in high-crime neighborhoods: Idleness and unemployment contribute to violence. “There is not enough to do,” O’Neill said, “or the programs that are out there —they don’t know about.”

For Davis, the pain of the shooting is twofold. First, there is the bullet still lodged in his back that doctors could not extract. (He was released from the hospital late Sunday with painkillers.) Then, there is the violence that still plagues Brownsville despite efforts to stop it.

The gunmen, he said, failed to grasp the deep “detriment” they had caused to the community by opening fire at an event meant to celebrate peace and surviving tough circumstances.

“I was just disappointed in these individuals,” he said. “They don’t understand what Brownsville Old Timers really meant.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/nyregion/brooklyn-shooting.html" id="7e8679c9-f760-36a2-aebc-01d316aad2eb">The New York Times</a>.

How a Brooklyn Rite of Summer Ended in Bloodshed

NEW YORK — Anthony Davis said he had just parted ways with an old friend at the Brownsville Old Timers Day block party when he heard a woman warn that a fight was about to break out.

Instead, at least two gunmen opened fire as the neighborhood block party in Brownsville was winding down late Saturday, killing a 38-year-old man and wounding 11 people in the crossfire, authorities said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a news conference Sunday morning at the scene, lamented the violence at an event that had been held “successfully and peacefully” for decades and “had been an example of everything good about Brownsville.”

More than 100 police officers were on duty at the party when the shots rang out minutes before 11 p.m. near the intersection of Christopher and Hegeman avenues, where about 2,000 people had gathered in and near a playground, police said.

The man who died was shot in the head as he waited for an Uber to take him home after Old Timers Day, which has endured without violence since its inception in 1963, according to police and Assemblywoman Latrice M. Walker, a native of Brownsville who left the party less than an hour before the shooting.

The shooting quickly eclipsed what was becoming a success story in Brownsville, a neighborhood scarred by decades of official neglect, deep poverty and street violence. Shootings had been declining this year in the neighborhood despite a slight rise in gun violence across the city.

Walker said the shooting death was a painful turn of events on an already somber occasion for her family. Her brother, she said, was shot and killed 32 years ago to the day. The victim of Sunday’s shooting, she added, was the second of his siblings to die by gun violence.

“I’m hurt,” Walker said. “I’m mourning.”

Police did not say whether any of the victims — who ranged in age from 21 to 55 — had been the targets of the gunfire, or if the gunmen had indiscriminately strafed the crowd with bullets.

One of the most seriously injured partygoers remained in critical condition Sunday at an area hospital. Other victims remained hospitalized in serious condition, and several had been treated for their injuries and released, the police said.

Police said detectives were still searching for the gunmen and investigating whether the motive for the violence stemmed from a gang dispute. A gun was found at the scene, but investigators had not determined if it was used in the shooting, police officials said.

Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill asked people who had been in the playground to send any videos from before, during or after the shooting.

“Please, please turn that over to us,” he said. “It would be very helpful.”

Videos circulating online after the mayhem show police trying to gain control of a chaotic and sprawling crime scene full of residents and strewn with food containers, bottles, chairs and tables. The bloodshed turned police cars into ambulances as officers helped rush victims to the hospital, police and fire officials said.

The shooting disrupted what in many New York City neighborhoods is an annual summer ritual. Even in some of the city’s grittiest neighborhoods, warm-weather block parties draw neighbors outside for conversation, food and drinks, games and music. Saturday’s Old Timers Day block party capped more than a week of festivities that included musical performances, a fashion and talent show and a street festival.

Shootings in Brownsville have declined from last year, and fewer people have been struck by gunfire, according to police data through July 21, the most recent available.

Brownsville’s decline in shootings has defied a rise in violence in other parts of northern Brooklyn that the police have said has contributed to the citywide uptick in shootings. Overall in New York, there have been more shootings and slightly more people struck by gunfire this year compared with the same period in 2018, according to police data.

Brownsville drew renewed attention last week after video surfaced of a man there pouring a pail of water over a police officer’s head. The video was one of at least four that escalated a public debate about how restrained officers should be when they are humiliated or taunted by the public.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said Saturday night’s shooting stemmed from the city’s failure to support anti-violence programs that work in crevices of the city where violence remains stubbornly high. He called for more funding for programs that have been proven to defuse tension before it escalates.

The city spends $36 million on such programs, but Adams said that is barely half what is needed. Additionally, he said the city is often late to pay groups that do the work, leaving them unable to pay staff members who risk their lives walking into combustible situations.

De Blasio, at the news conference, vowed to increase funding and interagency support for the city’s Cure Violence programs, describing the goal of getting guns off the streets as “our most essential mission.”

Local officials said they had complained for years that the city was not doing enough to target its pockets where violence remains persistently high. Some of the anti-violence programs still encounter opposition from hospitals and city agencies, but resistance is most acute from the police, said Adams, a retired New York Police Department captain and the co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

De Blasio has embraced a neighborhood policing program designed by O’Neill, and the two frequently speak of crime-fighting as a two-way process that requires the police and civilians to work together. But Adams said that in some places, an antiquated mindset persists among some officers.

“Those terms about community and police coming together, those are bumper stickers and slogans,” he said, adding it is “not a reality in all communities.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/nyregion/brooklyn-shooting-brownsville-park.html" id="77293b60-fd27-3153-aced-5b906dcb23e7">The New York Times</a>.

Gunmen Fire Into Crowd at Block Party, Killing 1 and Injuring 11

NEW YORK — The organizers of the 56th annual Old Timers Day in Brooklyn welcomed the thousands of people expected at the beloved event with one word of caution: “All r welcome let’s come in peace,” a photo caption attached to a Facebook flyer read.

Outrage continued to grow Wednesday as the police arrested three men who were seen on video hurling water over the weekend in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The officers had been sent to disperse disorderly groups at fire hydrants during a three-day heat wave and in both incidents left without arresting the assailants, who were egged on by bystanders.

The police were still seeking at least one other man involved in one of the incidents, in Harlem, where an officer was struck in the head as he was handcuffing a man with an open arrest warrant on the back of a car.

Police officers are often accused of using too much force, as the proliferation of cellphone cameras makes it easy for people to record and share events online. But the recent videos prompted a rare rebuke from the Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, who said the officers had put up with too much.

“Any cop who thinks that’s all right, that they can walk away from something like that, maybe should reconsider whether or not this is the profession for them,” said Terence Monahan, the chief of department. “We don’t take that.”

His comments followed a Police Department memo reminding officers that while courts give civilians wide leeway to heap verbal abuse on officers, physical acts like dousing or spraying water could result in a variety of charges: obstructing governmental administration, criminal tampering, harassment and disorderly conduct. If an officer’s equipment is damaged, it is also possible to file a charge of criminal mischief, the memo said.

Police officials said one of the men arrested Wednesday, Courtney Thompson, 28, of Brooklyn, was seen on video dumping water on an officer’s head in the borough’s Brownsville neighborhood Saturday. Two other men, Isaiah Scott, 23, and Chad Bowen, 28, were charged after they were recorded hurling water at officers making an arrest Sunday in Harlem, the police said. All were in custody and could not be reached for comment.

Thompson was charged with obstructing government administration, disorderly conduct and harassment; Scott, of Roebling, New Jersey, was charged with criminal mischief for throwing water at a woman and damaging her phone; Bowen, of Harlem, was also charged with criminal mischief.

All three men had prior arrests, and Thompson, who the police said is a member of the “Brownsville Fresh Gangstas,” a Crips subset, is on probation for a 2015 robbery. His lengthy rap sheet included an arrest in March on charges he assaulted a police officer during a traffic stop.

Before the arrests, the police commissioner, James O’Neill, said the city and the Police Department would “never tolerate such disrespect.”

Donovan Richards, the chairman of the City Council committee that oversees the Police Department, said Monahan’s remarks were troubling because they criticized the officers for doing what the department preaches: exercising restraint. He said that while the men’s actions were “reprehensible,” the officers deserved to be commended for avoiding a needless confrontation that could have spiraled out of control.

“These officers shouldn’t publicly be ridiculed,” he said. “They did the right thing. They defused a situation that could have been worse.”

The videos were widely circulated and hotly debated after they were posted on Instagram. On Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence joined a chorus of public officials who condemned what he called “disgraceful” attacks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, traded barbs with his Republican predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, over which mayor’s policies were to blame.

Giuliani, who as mayor initiated an era of aggressive enforcement for minor offenses, suggested that de Blasio’s decision to reverse that policy was to blame for the disrespect shown to the police. De Blasio shot back that crime rates were low “because we're bridging the divide between police and communities.”

Conservative politicians and two of the city’s largest police unions seized on the videos as evidence of the perils of recent efforts to roll back enforcement that targets low-level crime. The Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, a former police officer, and 26 other prominent black New Yorkers signed an open letter published Wednesday condemning the attacks and calling on neighbors to respect the Police Department “when its officers are lawfully doing exactly what we have asked them to do.”

Patrick Lynch, the president of the city’s largest police union, said criminals have been emboldened by some district attorneys’ refusal to prosecute low-level crimes like fare evasion and marijuana possession, as well as recently enacted state and local laws requiring officers to issue tickets for certain offenses instead of making arrests.

“The chaos will continue to escalate unless something changes,” he said in a statement.

But proponents of curbing enforcement of petty offenses say aggressive tactics are unnecessary in an era of historically low crime — and only feed resentment of the police.

Richards, the City Council member, said Lynch’s portrayal of the incidents was a reflection of the lack of diversity in police union leadership. He said the Police Department’s efforts to build trust in neighborhoods alienated by decades of aggressive policing were helping to ease tension. Hostility remains, Richards said, because the Police Department and the union fail to respond vigorously when officers abuse civilians.

“The climate is where it’s at because there is no accountability,” he said.

One former police official said Monahan’s comments ignored the fear among officers of becoming the next Daniel Pantaleo, an officer whose name became synonymous with excessive force after cellphone video captured his attempt to arrest Eric Garner for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island in 2014. The 43-year-old man died, and his final words — “I can’t breathe” — became a rallying cry in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It’s a Catch-22,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his job. “You have to recognize the difficulty of these jobs, and you can’t be a pendulum saying, ‘Take action. Show restraint.’ ”

Opening fire hydrants is a summer cooling ritual in many of New York’s poor and predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. But it’s also a crime without a business permit or a spray cap installed by the Fire Department. Offenders can be punished by a fine of up to $1,000 and 30 days in jail.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/nyregion/nypd-water-bucket-arrest.html" id="028e5668-d815-3d41-a7ca-cf2d2594f57f">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who brazenly dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

Dousing of Officers Stirs Debate on Police Restraint

Outrage continued to grow Wednesday as the police arrested three men who were seen on video hurling water over the weekend in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The officers had been sent to disperse disorderly groups at fire hydrants during a three-day heat wave and in both incidents left without arresting the assailants.

The police were still seeking at least one other man involved in one of the incidents, in Harlem, where an officer was struck in the head as he was handcuffing a man with an arrest warrant.

Police officers are often accused of using too much force, as the proliferation of cellphone cameras makes it easy for people to share events online. But the recent videos prompted a rare rebuke from the Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer.

His comments followed a department memo reminding officers that while courts give civilians wide leeway to heap verbal abuse on officers, physical acts like dousing or spraying water can result in charges.

NEW YORK — Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

Ashley Southall

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